Lyndon Nerenberg (lyndon@atg.aciworldwide.com)
Thu, 13 Dec 2001 12:50:48 -0700
> >client issue. Localization / personalization of the INBOX is an client
> >issue and MUST be dealt with there.
>
> Why must it be dealt with in the client? Sorry, I am not trying to be
> difficult; I really want to understand. Sure, clients could be made
> configurable so that a user could name his INBOX anything he chooses. But
> why when that could be centralized at the server?
Because this presumes a one-to-one mapping between individuals
and INBOXes. Imagine a single account shared by several hundred
people on, say, a support desk. Because you have customers around
the globe you have support staff fluent in several languages.
So, of those (say) 50 languages spoken by your support staff
sharing this INBOX, which one wins the name-INBOX-on-the-server
contest? (Hint: I hope both you and your MUA can handle Mandarin.)
INBOX represents a specific entity on the IMAP server: the canonical
location where you can expect newly arrived mail to show up. The
label is arbitrary. We could have named it as an ASN-encoded OID
for that matter. Either way, how that *entity* is displayed to the
user is up to the MUA. The only purpose for giving it a (any) label
at all on the server is to allow it to be uniquely addressed.
--lyndon
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu Dec 13 2001 - 21:51:03 IST